On April 15, after dozens of workers at Cargill’s vast meatpacking plant in southern Alberta had tested positive for COVID-19, provincial safety inspectors decided that things were getting serious. So they decided to conduct an emergency inspection — on FaceTime.

Taking their cue from those virtual open-houses run by real estate brokers, the inspector had a really good look at the sprawling plant, and declared the place safe to continue operating. A few days later, Alberta’s Minister of Agriculture Devin Dreeshen reassured the workers that everything was just hunky dory.

“Directly communicated with workers to reassure them that their worksite is safe,” Dreeshen tweeted.

As an Alberta government spokesman later explained, the virtual inspection was “done to mitigate the exposure to all parties involved during the pandemic.”

Totally understandable. The Alberta inspectors were clearly scared stiff of getting sick by actually stepping inside the place with the hundreds of workers, many of them Filipinos on temporary work permits. It reminds me of the mining inspector who refuses to enter a coal mine suspected of a deadly methane leak. “Hell, I’m not going in there. It’s about to blow up.”

We all know what’s happened since. Cases at the Cargill plant have grown exponentially, making it home to one of the largest single outbreaks in the country. As of Thursday, 480 workers had tested positive for COVID-19, including one worker who has died and another who is in critical condition. Another 140 cases in the wider community are linked to the plant, which has been closed, slashing Canada’s beef production.

“When an Occupational Health and Safety inspector won’t attend the plant and instead does a plant tour by cell phone, that should tell you something is wrong,” Thomas Hesse, president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union local at the plant, told CBC News.

Another serious outbreak is ravaging the employees at JBS, a beef plant in Brooks, Alta., where 124 cases of COVID-19 have been reported. A big pork plant in Quebec was forced to close for two weeks in late March because of an outbreak and facilities producing poultry have been struck as well in British Columbia. Like nursing homes and prisons, meat processing plants are ideal places for the virus to spread.

The problem at Cargill is that maintaining production was a chief concern. And keeping the plant open was also a priority for beef producers, a powerful political force in the province, which Minister Dreeshen was anxious to defend. It didn’t help that the Alberta government, like so many right-wing governments everywhere, doesn’t really believe in regulation in the first place.

For decades now, the ideological right, aided and abetted by corporate interests, have systematically undermined the regulatory system designed to protect the public from harm. According to this philosophy, rules are just a nuisance, a hindrance to economic growth and expansion. Let companies run their businesses. They’re the experts.

We know where that’s led us. To the Lac-Megantic rail disaster, where light-touch rail regulation played a huge role in that catastrophe, and to the Boeing fiasco, where the U.S. government approval process for new aircraft was basically sub-contracted to the aircraft maker itself, with hundreds dying in the crashes that ensued.

In Alberta, Jason Kenney’s United Conservative Party ran in the 2019 election on a platform that promised to slash what it called “red tape,” basically by eliminating regulations.

“We’re going to take Alberta from being the most over-regulated to the freest economy in Canada,” the platform said.

Ontario’s Progressive Conservative government has been on the same bandwagon. “Make Ontario Open for Business” was a key part of Doug Ford’s successful election campaign, which focused on freezing the minimum wage and reducing paid sick days for employees. Eliminating regulations was also a big part of Ford’s Open for Business mantra. “We have to get off the backs of our small businesses and medium-sized businesses,” according to Ontario Economic Development Minister Todd Smith.

Never do these right-wing leaders in Alberta or Ontario ever mention the need to maintain and even tighten some regulations to protect the public and employees. How can workers in a growing industry, like Amazon or Uber, be adequately protected with new rules when these governments basically don’t believe in regulation?

This light touch regulatory approach has been extended in Ontario, quite unbelievably, to the long-term care sector, which has been struggling with low staffing levels and questionable care standards for years.

Quietly, the Ontario government essentially has stopped doing its most comprehensive annual inspections of care homes, called Resident Quality Inspection (RQI). Those inspections require interviews with 40 people related to the home, and meeting standards of care related to issues like infection control, according to Jane Meadus, a staff lawyer for the Advocacy Group for the Elderly, a Toronto-based advocacy group.

Instead of doing these thorough unannounced inspections, the province essentially decided that if a home got any kind of inspection during the year, no matter how light, it would count as a full one. The CBC has discovered that there were only nine of these full inspections were done in 2019 on 626 homes.

“I was shocked,” said Meadus. “I couldn’t believe it has gone down that low.” I asked her do nursing homes ever get closed down because of poor care? Never, responds Meadus. “We need the beds.”

So in effect, the regulatory system has lost its way. Instead of protecting the vulnerable and assuring that minimum health and safety standards are maintained, it’s been part of a coordinated undermining of these very protections, whether at nursing homes or meatpacking plants.

A cooperative approach with business is nice in principle. But regulators and operators should never be in bed together. The public interest must always trump private interests.

Let’s hope that this pandemic sounds the death knell to this kind of mindless, ideologically-driven deregulation. Lives are at stake.

*Devin Dreeshen’s tweet has been corrected.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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Alan Freeman is an Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. He came to the U of O from the Department of Finance, where he served as assistant deputy minister of consultations and communications. Alan joined the public service in 2008 after a distinguished career in journalism as a parliamentary reporter and business journalist for The Canadian Press, The Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail. At the Globe, he spent more than 10 years as a foreign correspondent based in Berlin, London and Washington.